In "'The Bell Curve' and Its Critics" [May], Charles Murray does your
readers a disservice by using the same standards of evidence and scholarship
that he adopted in the book he wrote with the late Richard J. Herrnstein. By
portraying himself as a persecuted scholar held to higher standards than other
social scientists by his critics, he hints darkly at a unified conspiracy
against him by like-minded but intellectually slovenly social scientists.

The academic response to his book does not present a united front. There is
much more subtlety to the criticism of his work than Mr. Murray's broad-brush
summary conveys. It is surely disingenuous for him to lump serious academic
criticism with the inflammatory journalistic reviews that appeared in the
popular press. As one of the critics mentioned by name, and the first person
thanked in the acknowledgments section of The Bell Curve, I wish to report
that Mr. Murray does not mention or respond to any of my substantive
criticisms of his work, nor does he mention any of the fundamental points of
agreement that have emerged in the literature that responds to his work. (My
survey is scheduled for publication in the October 1995 issue of the journal
of Political Economy, the house journal of the University of Chicago. A more
popular version appeared in Reason magazine, March 1995.)

The basic premise of the book is that g--or a single factor of
intelligence--explains behavior, and that it is immutable. An essential flaw
in this argument is that it equates skill with general intelligence, contrary
to the findings of a large body of research in social science. No one denies
that "one factor" accounts for "a lot" of the variability in test scores
across persons. But using the methodological standards adopted by Herrnstein
and Murray themselves, more than one factor is required to explain test scores
and wages. In reality, as many as four factors are required to explain wages.

Mr. Murray's appeal for support to the work of Raymond Carroll is
misleading. Carroll's reanalysis of test-score data does not support the
single g model--contrary to the claims made by Mr. Murray (see p. 706 of
Carroll's Human Cognitive Abilities, 1993). In fact, Carroll finds evidence
that multiple skills explain social performance, and account for correlations
among tests.

None of this denies that ability tests predict something valued in society.
But Carroll's evidence and the evidence cited in my review indicate that many
skills affect outcomes and not all can be equated with native intelligence.
Once this is recognized, a core argument in The Bell Curve evaporates and a
much more subtle analysis of social policy is required. Even if IQ cannot be
manipulated, partial offsets for it are available because success in life
depends on more than raw intelligence.

Mr. Murray seeks to avoid the hard job of evaluating social programs
designed to boost skills by claiming that skills are synonymous with IQ; that
IQ cannot be manipulated; and that nothing else can compensate for a low IQ.
There is ample evidence that Mr. Murray's measure of "intelligence"--really a
score on an achievement test--can be manipulated by educational interventions,
that many skills besides raw intelligence are valued in society, and that
these skills can be produced by environment.

JAMES J. HECKMAN University of Chicago Chicago, Illinois

To The Editor of Commentary:

Charles Murray's brief attempted rebuttal of the article I published over
six months ago in the New York Review of Books consists mainly of a distortion
of my arguments and, even more unfortunately a whitewash of the Pioneer
Fund--the far-right organization which funded much of the pseudo-scholarship
upon which The Bell Curve relies.

Mr. Murray writes that I "alleged" Pioneer was "established and run by men
who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial
superiority."

There is nothing alleged about it. The 1937 charter of the Pioneer Fund
specified its goal as aiding "parents of unusual value as citizens," who were
defined as those "descended primarily from white persons who settled in the
original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the
United States."

Wyckliffe Draper, whose fortune founded the Pioneer Fund, was an ardent
eugenicist. The most ideologically influential of the fund's five founding
directors, Harry Laughlin, was superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office
and campaigned in the U.S. for the sterilization of the "feeble-minded." He
served as honorary vice president (in absentia) of a eugenics conference in
Berlin in 1935, and drummed up support in the U.S. for Nazi eugenics policy.
It was Laughlin who persuaded Draper to undertake the Pioneer Fund's first
activity, in 1937: funding the distribution in America of an edited version of
the German eugenics propaganda film Erbkrank ("Hereditary Illness".)

"Never mind," Mr. Murray adds, that "the relationship between the founder
of the Pioneer Fund and today's Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the
relationship between Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation."

This is a spurious analogy. Yes, in 1918 Henry Ford published a series of
anti-Semitic tracts in his Dearborn newspaper, including the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. Nine years later, he apologized (sincerely or not), retracted
his statements, and shut down the newspaper. In 1936, he created the Ford
Foundation to support the Henry Ford Hospital and other charitable activities
in Michigan. Henry Ford died in 1947; his heirs eventually surrendered all
control over the selection of directors and the funding activities of the
foundation. Not surprisingly, then, Henry Ford's anti-Semitism and right-wing
ideology have no lingering influence whatsoever over today's Ford Foundation,
which has an endowment of $6.8 billion and 400 employees worldwide. Ford
grants, in fact, are frequently criticized for supporting left-wing minority
organizations.

Today's Pioneer Fund, by contrast, has made no apology, even a perfunctory
one, for the extreme right-wing leanings of its founders. The only changes
have been cosmetic, such as deleting the reference to "white" persons from its
charter--in 1985. Such concessions to fashion aside, the Pioneer Fund remains
true to the essential purposes of its founders. Virtually every project the
fund has underwritten has had to do with "proving" the mental inferiority of
black people.

This is largely because the $5-million fund consists of a group of five
unpaid "directors," of whom the only fully active decision-maker is Harry
Weyher. Weyher, a New York lawyer, is the chosen successor of Wyckliffe
Draper. Draper picked him because of his ideological reliability; Weyher
shared Draper's opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

According to Mr. Murray, the "main substantive issue" I discuss relative to
his book is African IQ. In fact, my article also took on his arguments about
Asian IQ, and his claims about the purported impact of immigration on
America's intelligence supply.

As for the matter of African IQ, however, my article did not, as Mr.
Murray's distorted summary would have it, "point to the many technical
difficulties of knowing exactly what is going on." Rather, I pointed out that
Mr. Murray's data contradict his own contention--which was that low African IQ
scores suggest that the low scores of African-Americans are due to genetic and
other factors, rather than a history of oppression in the United States.

Mr. Murray's claim of extremely low African IQ derives from tests conducted
in South Africa before the end of apartheid. This fact was not revealed in The
Bell Curve--and small wonder. South Africa is hardly a place to find black
people free from the effects of centuries of oppression. In fact, low IQ
scores there can easily be construed to support the view that lower black
intellectual achievement is a result of racism. This is anything but a
"technical" issue.

Mr. Murray's "facts" about Africa came from Pioneer-funded British
psychologist Richard Lynn. Lynn, an editor of the notoriously racialist
journal Mankind Quarterly (which, pace Murray, is neither "respected" nor
"refereed"), is on record in support of the scientifically absurd view that
the "proliferation" of the poor and other "weak specimens" needs to be
discouraged in the interests of "the genetic quality of the group."

Not surprisingly, then, this "scholar" accepted South African IQ test
results at face value, as a fair test of the inherent intellectual
capabilities of blacks not only in South Africa but in the continent as a
whole. And Mr. Murray replicated his error.

In 1968, Richard Nixon had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Charles
Murray now assures tis that he has "many more details" that would clinch his
argument about African IQ, but these were omitted from The Bell Curve
because--well, Mr. Murray doesn't say why. He does say that I "want this
literature to be weak and racist." How can I "want" it to be anything, when I
don't even know it exists?

Perhaps Charles Murray did not know all the facts about the Pioneer Fund
and Mankind Quarterly when he wrote his book. But now that he does, he must
cease to deny them. He must deal openly and honestly with their implications
for The Bell Curve. For a man who depicts himself in the pages of Commentary
as a brave struggler for unpleasant but vital truth, this is an appropriate
test of intellectual courage. The Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly are not
main-stream, modern scientific institutions. They are scientific racism's
keepers of the flame. And scientific racism is one of the scourges of this
century.

CHARLES LANE New, Republic Washington, D.C.

To The Editor of Commentary:

There are few things more predictable than an author's response to reviews
of his work, so it is not surprising that Charles Murray found Peter
Brimelow's review to be "the best published synopsis of The Bell Curve."
Brimelow likened the book to Darwin's Origin of Species, "the intellectual
event with which it is being seriously compared." Brimelow, who wants
immigration laws changed so that America's "racial balance" will be "shifted
back . . . where it was in 1960: almost 89 percent white . . .," shares Mr.
Murray's abhorrence of affirmative actioin and "quotas." Those quotas favor
blacks and Latinos.

What was not so predictable was the enorimously successful marketing
campaign for The Bell Curve engineered by the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) and the Free Press. The barrage of reviews in major newspapers and
magazines, just as the book was published, propelled it to the bestseller
lists and the talk shows, and into public consciousness. The reviews were
carefully cultivated by AEI. Mr. Murray, in Commentary, described an
AEI-sponsored "conference of academics and journalists from various points on
the political spectrum [held] soon after the book's publication." The authors
of many journalistic puff pieces, including Brimelow, had been invited to that
conference, expenses paid, and had been provided with advance copies of the
book.

The Wall Street Journal--it occupies a point well to the Left on Murray's
political spectrum--indicated that the book had been "swept forward by a
strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding
them from likely critics." The Journal suggested that AEI "tried to fix the
fight when it released review copies selectively, contrary to usual publishing
protocol." That charge was denied by AEI president Christopher DeMuth, who in
a letter to the Journal indicated that the conference had in fact been held
"several weeks before publication." DeMuth asserted that he had "made a
particular effort to attract likely critics to the conference ... with the
[deliberate] exception of Leon Kamin." That most unkindest cut smarts, but I
will try now to rise to the critical occasion. My allotted space permits
adequately detailed discussion of only a single topic. I will focus here on
the Herrnstein-Murray treatment of race and IQ. (My detailed critique of the
book appears in The Bell Curve Debate, edited by R. Jacoby and N. Glauberman,
Times Books/ Random House.)

Mr. Murray describes his book as "relentlessly moderate--in its language, .
. . filled with 'on the one hand, on the other hand' discussions.... Anchored
securely in the middle of the scientific road." But the book's description of
affirmative action as "a poison leaking into the American soul" suggests
passion, not moderation; and the even-handedness of Mr. Murray's
middle-of-the-road position is exemplified by his comments on the relationship
of genes to race differences in IQ. On the one hand, "it is scientifically
prudent at this point to assume that both environments and genes are involved,
in unknown proportions." But, on the other hand, "Herrnstein and I did not
make nearly as aggressive a case for genetic differences as the evidence
permits."

The nonaggressive approach taken in The Bell Curve was to examine a
hypothesis Herrnstein and I heard frequently, that the test scores of American
blacks have been depressed by the experience of slavery. We briefly summarize
the literature indicating that African blacks in fact have lower test scores
than American blacks ... on standardized mental tests, including ones
especially designed for illiterate non-Western subjects.

The logic here is: if slavery made American blacks dumb, then African
blacks, who have merely been colonized, not enslaved, should be smarter than
their genetic kinfolk in America. But in fact they arc dumber! So American
blacks must be dumb because of their genes. There is still a problem, however.
Why should American blacks be smarter than their African cousins? Herrnstein
and Murray maintain that "The IQ of 'colored' students in South Africa--of
mixed racial background--has been found to be similar to that of American
blacks." Miscegenation appears to have paid off, to the tune of some 15 IQ
points for American blacks. That follows since Richard Lynn, described in The
Bell Curve as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences," after
summarizing the literature, estimated the average IQ of Africans to be 70.
That is to say, half of all Africans are mentally retarded. That finding
evidently struck Herrnstein and Murray as reasonable. What, one wonders, would
Mr. Murray's more aggressive case for genetic differences look like?

But let us examine the test, widely used in Africa, which was "designed for
illiterate non-Western subjects." The test is Raven's Progressive Matrices.
Average scores on the Matrices, like those on other "IQ" tests, have been
rising steadily over time throughout the world. A massively large study of
Dutch draftees, using the Matrices, found that average IQ scores in Holland
had risen by about 25 IQ points between 1950 and 1982! Richard Lynn concluded
that

requirements for a culture-fair test are far from being met by the
Progressive Matrices. . . . The testee has to decipher the code and then solve
the progression problem. These largely arithmetical skills are of course
taught in schools. Dutch adolescents in the 1980's have enjoyed significantly
more schooling ... no doubt they have picked up a few more arithmetical
skills....

These observations did not prevent Lynn, four years later, from tabulating,
in a review article, numerous African studies using the Matrices. The Bell
Curve depended upon that review-article for its estimates of genetically
debased African IQ.

Lynn himself felt that "the best single study of the Negroid intelligence"
was performed in South Africa by Kenneth Owen, using the Junior Aptitude
Tests. Zulu school-children did very poorly on the test, so much so that Lynn
judged their average IQ to be 69. Owen (but not Lynn, or Herrnstein and
Murray) pointed out that "the knowledge of English of the majority of black
testees was so poor that certain [of the] tests . . . proved to be virtually
unusable." To do well, Owen wrote, Zulu pupils would have had to have been
familiar with electrical appliances, microscopes, and "Western type of ladies'
accessories."

Charles Murray has written that "the social science that deals in public
policy" has become "in a word, corrupt." Pithy, and the shoe does fit The Bell
Curve.

LEON J. KAMIN Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

To The Editor of Commentary:

Charles Murray takes the stance that many people have made an inappropriate
fuss over The Bell Curve's treatment of race and IQ, and professes himself
bemused that "the critics have been obsessed--no hyperbole here--with genes .
. . ," inasmuch as the book simply makes the point that

a legitimate scientific debate is under way about the relationship of genes
to race differences in intelligence; that it is scientifically prudent at this
point to assume that both environment and genes are involved, in unknown
proportions; and, most importantly, that people are getting far too excited
about the whole issue.

If this were all the book had really said on the topic of race and IQ, the
furor would indeed be a puzzle. But in fact, Herrnstein and Murray make three
assertions about race and IQ pointing to the likely biological basis of race
differences in IQ and to the probability that they are not eradicable by any
means currently known.... (I have recently criticized the way Herrnstein and
Murray make these points in a chapter in The Bell Curve Wars, edited by Steve
Fraser, Basic Books.)

First, as to Herrnstein and Murray's purported "review" of the direct
evidence on heritability of race differences in IQ. This consists of
presenting, at substantial length, only one of seven extant studies on the
question. This is an adoption study showing that black children adopted into
white families have lower Iq's than white children adopted into white
families. Despite the original investigators' cautions that their study could
not be taken as evidence for a genetic basis for IQ differences between the
races--for a variety of reasons ranging from the possibility that white
children might have been placed with more intelligent families to the
possibility that emotional and adjustment difficulties would have been present
for the black adoptees--Herrnstein and Murray declare the study to constitute
strong evidence of the heritability of race differences.

The remaining six studies are all more consistent with the alternative
position that genetic differences are negligible or that they favor blacks
slightly. Herrnstein and Murray dismiss one of these studies in a single
paragraph, citing interpretive difficulties of the same sort they neglect to
mention for the study they favor. Another study is dismissed on the same sort
of grounds in a note in the appendix. The other four studies are not mentioned
at all.

The second major point of the case for genetics is that one cannot hope
that low cognitive abilities of either blacks or whites can be much improved
by intervention of any kind. They review two studies on intervention in
infancy, both of which had very positive results but which they reject on
methodological grounds. They ignore a dozen studies not subject to such
criticisms but having results consistent with the two they reject. These
additional studies include a recent, very large study conducted at eight
different sites.

Herrnstein and Murray conclude that although vigorous post-infancy,
preschool interventions boost IQ by 7 points or so, this is of little
importance because gains fade by third grade. Yet it should be obvious (except
to those holding dubious "ballistic" or "critical-period" theories of early
intervention) that one would expect gains to be maintained only if enrichment
were maintained. Herrnstein and Murray do not mention the evidence that this
is, in fact, the case. More importantly, with one exception, they do not
mention the interventions that have been initiated in elementary school.
William J. Bennett, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education, has described a
score of such programs that have proved effective. Detailed reports on many of
them appear in the education literature. The single elementary-school study
reported on in The Bell Curve is an intervention that produced a gain of
between 1.5 and 6.5 IQ points in a single year. This they discount because it
is only one study and data could not be obtained on the question of the
maintenance of the gains.

Though it is known that intermediate-school and high-school math programs
can have a very dramatic effect on minority children's math scores, this is
also not mentioned. Finally, college programs exist that have a marked impact
on minority achievement in several different specific fields, and on overall
grade-point average. Yet again none of these demonstrations is mentioned.

In short, the review of intervention programs is so highly selective as to
be misleading in the extreme, and so negative about the programs it does
discuss as to forfeit any claim to represent balanced analysis.

Now, as for the 15-point gap in IQ between blacks and whites, Herrnstein
and Murray refer to 10 studies of the current gap in IQ (or in a composite of
abilities that is highly correlated with IQ). Summarizing these studies, they
allow that the gap might have narrowed to 12 or 13 points now, though
elsewhere in the book and several times in recent public statements by Mr.
Murray, including his article in Commentary, this gap is restored to a full 15
points. In fact, however, the current gap indicated by the median value of the
studies reviewed by Herrnstein and Murray, and using the numbers they supply,
is 9 points. Their description of these data goes beyond dubious analysis,
beyond irresponsibly selective choice of evidence, to become outright
misrepresentation.

In short, the burden of my critique is that the treatment of the question
of race, heredity, and IQ in The Bell Curve is so selective, eccentric in
interpretation, and factually incorrect that it could not be published in any
reputable journal. In his article, Mr. Murray responds to these assertions
only by attempting to discredit my statement that there is a large literature
showing effective intervention with infants which is not subject to the
criticisms in the Herrnstein and Murray book, and which shows substantial IQ
gains.

Since I give only one example of this literature, Mr. Murray writes as if
only one exists. He asserts that the large gains reported for this study did
not persist past age three, when Iq's are still unstable, and that the gain at
age five had declined to a mere 2.5 points. Once again, he is trying to make
the data say what he wants them to say rather than what they actually say. The
2.5 figure refers to the entire sample including an unusual group of very
low-birth-weight infants. The near-normal-weight infants in the sample gained
4 to 6 points, or rather retained them because the intervention ended two
years before the children were five years old, and the gain was even higher
for children born to mothers with little education. These data are highly
encouraging and entirely in line with the rest of the literature on
normal-weight infants.

Most of your readers will have recognized the shrill and panicked nature of
much of the reaction to the Herrnstein and Murray assertions about race and
IQ. This is likely to create in any dispassionate person the presumption that
that someone's ox is being deservedly gored. The hysterical response to The
Bell Curve is, in my opinion, the major reason the book is being paid any
attention on the question of race and IQ. The scholarly critiques that will be
coming out in the years to come will show how terrible the science in the book
is. In the meantime, a great deal of damage has been done--to rational policy
discussion and to relations of trust between blacks and whites.

RICHARD E. NISBETT Institute for Social Research University of Michigan Ann
Arbor, Michigan

To The Editor of Commentary:

... In "'The Bell Curve' and Its Critics," Charles Murray argues that
criticisms of the Herrnstein/ Murray measure of background effects in the form
of a weighted average of the education, occupation, and income of parents
(called SES or socioeconomic status) are unfounded. He asserts that he and
Herrnstein "deliberately constructed an SES index that uses the same elements
that everybody else uses" and "throws down a challenge ... to come up with
another means of measuring the environment."

Readers unfamiliar with the research literature on the effects of social
environment on individual achievement may assume that Mr. Murray accurately
describes the current state of research in this field. In fact, nothing could
be farther from the truth. Measuring social background using only occupation,
education, and income of parents characterizes only the earliest studies of
the late 1960's and early 1970's. Since then a vast body of work has appeared
in the leading academic journals of economics, sociology, and child
development in which more subtle and sophisticated methods of assessing
social-background effects have been put forward. Even a cursory examination of
this work would reveal that Mr. Murray's "challenge" to professional social
scientists--that we "come up with another means of measuring the
environment"--has long since been met.

Characterizing how social environment impacts on individual achievement is
a difficult and complex process. A central aspect of this difficulty involves
identifying whether or not a particular correlation--say, between a
youngster's churchgoing and her subsequent avoidance of early
pregnancy--reflects a "causal" relationship, or is merely an artifact of some
unmeasured factor which influences both churchgoing and early child-bearing
(e.g., intensity of parental supervision). Attention to this kind of
difficulty is what separates high-quality professional work in the field from
the more pedestrian efforts.

Thus, contrary to Mr. Murray's claim that the book uses the same SES index
that everyone uses, the literature of the effects of social background on
children's academic achievement has identified a long list of factors which
significantly influence the outcomes for children.

These factors include: (1) peer influences in the form of perceived peer
education plans; (2) parental expectations and aspirations for their
children's schooling; (3) the income and racial composition of the community
of origin; (4) the amount of time mothers spend in the labor market; (5)
family structure--two parents versus a single parent, and whether parents are
separated or divorced; (6) number of siblings and birth order; (7) religious
denomination and church attendance; (8) grandparents' schooling; (9) age of
the mother at birth; (10) measures of the quality of stimulation found in the
home environment, including emotional and verbal responsivity of the mother,
provision of appropriate play materials, time and quality of maternal
involvement with the child .... parental instigation of and participation in
intellectual activities, parental affection, rejection, and nurturance ...
etc.; (11) language spoken at home; (12) discussions about college plans with
teachers and other school officials; (13) parental emphasis on self-direction
versus conformity; (14) ethnicity and immigrant status; (15) parental
involvement in school activities; and (16) parental wealth and receipt of
welfare income.

This long list is hardly exhaustive. I enumerate at such length only to
stress how grossly inaccurate is Mr. Murray's assertion that, by including
their simple index of parents' education, occupation, and income, he and
Herrnstein were using "what everybody else uses."

A list of the researchers who have contributed to the statistical analysis
of various bodies of data in an effort to identify how social background,
broadly construed, affects academic achievement would include scores of names
and read like a "who's who" of the fields of applied economics, sociology, and
child psychology. The same is true of the other dimensions of achievement
which Herrnstein and Murray investigate in The Bell Curve--poverty, welfare
dependency, criminal behavior, parenting effectiveness, etc.

Finally, as a professional economist working in this area, I am taken aback
by Mr. Murray's insinuation that academic investigation of the effects of
social background on offspring's achievement has been somehow stunted by the
purported liberal political commitments of researchers in this field. Contrary
to Mr. Murray's claims, we do not all think alike. I often find myself at odds
with more liberal colleagues on policy questions. What I share with these
colleagues, though, are a commitment to using the appropriate techniques of
investigation and a reliance on peer review and critique before putting
research findings which bear on important matters of policy in the public
domain. Reading The Bell Curve, and now Mr. Murray's response to his critics,
makes me wish that this commitment were more widely shared.

There is a nearly universal consensus among professional analysts who have
reviewed Herrnstein and Murray's statistics that they grossly underestimate
the relative effect of environment versus intelligence in accounting for
individual differences in various dimensions of achievement. It is genuinely
puzzling that Herrnstein and Murray failed to include a richer array of
background factors in their analysis, since many of these items were
unavailable in the data set they employed. Studies now going on and using the
same data (e.g., one by Jonathan Crane of the University of Illinois) suggest
that these richer measures of social background may account for much of the
racial gap in cognitive test scores.

Thus, in his response to critics, Mr. Murray is calling on the experts to
do what we have, for many years now, already been doing while leaving us no
credible explanation for why he and Richard Herrnstein failed to do it
themselves.

LINDA DATCHER LOURY Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts

To The Editor of Commentary:

Given the motivations of the critics of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray's
compendious and lucid response will not silence them. TO suggest that
individuals and groups may differ in innate abilities, specifically
intelligence, and that these differences are not reducible to socioeconomic
causes, or entirely malleable, inevitably draws a hysterical response from
dogmatic egalitarians who believe that au fond all men must be "created equal"
in a far more literal sense than jefferson ever dreamt of. Those in the media,
literary intellectuals, and academics accept as common sense the para-Marxist
view propagated- in sociology courses that life chances differ according to
the economic class into which one is born. (Although dead elsewhere, Marxism
leads a merry afterlife in academe.) ...

But The Bell Curve proves that life chances depend far more on one's
cognitive ability than on one's class and, worse, that cognitive ability is
mostly the cause rather than the effect of one's position in life. Class, the
wealth or poverty of one's parents, matters far less than one's IQ, which
largely (about 60 percent) is an independent variable.

Much of the negative reaction to The Bell Curve can be attributed to the
fact that its conclusions are inconsistent with what is taught in sociology
courses and with what, wittingly or unwittingly, is accepted by most literary
intellectuals. It is much easier to repudiate The Bell Curve than to part from
the egalitarian dogma and notions which hitherto have explained everything.

ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG New York City New York

To The Editor of Commentary:

Charles Murray is correct when he states in his article that he and Richard
Herrnstein downplayed the evidence for the genetic basis of ethnic/race
differences in cognitive ability (including the very high IQ of Jews). They
even equivocated on whether the term "race" can be applied to
African-Americans who may be more "white" than "black," genetically
speaking....

Researchers like me are greatly indebted to The Bell Curve (and its
critics) for getting the "genie out of the bottle," i.e., the idea that
individual and racial differences are due, at least in part, to genetic
differences. Human differences can be fully understood only in a wider
(evolutionary) context. Such understanding will show why the "American
dilemma" is international in scope.

J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

To The Editor of Commentary:

Charles Murray has once again demonstrated why he is among the most
perceptive social scientists and social critics in America today (along with
James Q. Wilson and Peter L. Berger). The incredibly hostile reception
accorded The Bell Curve would have thrown a lesser person into paroxysms of
vituperation. Instead, Mr. Murray coolly and clinically diagnoses the causes
and foresees some of the consequences of the hysterical treatment his
exemplary study has provoked.

The Bell Curve (like its predecessor, IQ in the Meritocracy, by Mr.
Murray's co-author Richard J. Herrnstein) simply draws inferences from the
disparities in intelligence that are readily observable among individuals and
groups. That these inferences are not conducive to utopian designs for society
is, as Mr. Murray contends, a wholly "modest" finding.

What is so infuriating is the abuse to which Mr. Murray has been subjected.
It is one thing to attempt to refute his arguments; quite another to
assassinate his character by impugning his motives, sources of funding, and
even his high-school pranks of decades ago. I cannot for the life of me
understand why some of the most respected scholars in the country stoop to
ad-hominem attacks. It is one thing for TV talk-show host Phil Donahue to
violate elementary canons of civil discourse by accusing Mr. Murray, without
any justification, of having been proto-Nazi in adolescence. It is quite
another for Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould to make only slightly more
sophisticated but equally spurious and damning allegations.

I have watched in despair as Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Levin, Carol
Iannone, Steven Goldberg, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Thomas Sowell, and dozens of
other first-rate scholars have been vilified for following where evidence and
logic lead. Without minimizing their suffering, I would say that Charles
Murray has been the subject of an academic inquisition which is without
parallel in recent memory. It makes me ashamed of my profession to realize
that smear tactics are the weapons of choice in the battle over ideas for
people trained and paid to lead a "life of the mind." Truly, in the words of
Thomas Jefferson, "I weep for my country when I reflect that God is just."

LLOYD B. LEWIS Savannah College of Art and Design Savannah, Georgia

To The Editor of Commentary:

I write to corroborate, by way of personal anecdote, Charles Murray's
proposition that "the critics of The Bell Curve are going to produce the very
effects that their attacks have been intended to avert."

Shortly after the book's publication I was invited to attend a lecture at
MIT. Neither the topic nor the speaker was specified, but I inferred that the
subject was significant and the speaker's reputation weighty along the
Cambridge corridor.

I arrived at the overfilled lecture hall with my critical canvas a tabula
rasa: I knew of Stephen Jay Gould (the speaker, it turned out) only vaguely; I
knew of Charles Murray (part of the topic) even more vaguely; I knew of The
Bell Curve (the balance of the topic) not at all. I was an innocent.

If I harbored any expectation, it was that I would be exposed to reasoned,
objective, critical, and informative discourse, based on sound scholarship.
What I was exposed to instead was an academic hour of arch, snide, and
conclusory attack on a book and its absent authors.

Perhaps with some residual respect for the newly deceased Richard J.
Herrnstein, Gould concentrated his sharper ad-hominem weapons on Charles
Murray. Directly and indirectly Gould made him out to be an intellectual
lackey ... of the far Right, which, ... to Gould's correct-thinking audience,
meant that he and his work were probably infected with racism. In Gould's
view, Mr. Murray's scholarship was, of course, flimsy, based on discredited
psychometrics, the antediluvian g, and the outmoded IQ concept. Using clever
innuendo, as well as facial expressions and patronizing chuckles to indicate
his far-superior intellect, Gould left little doubt as to the charlatanry of
the authors....

At the end of Gould's talk, I felt I had not heard a critical lecture on
behavioral science but a sermon on theology, complete with a postmodern edict
of excommunication....

In the weeks that followed, the deluge of equally vitriolic reviews
directed at The Bell Curve confirmed my impression that much more was at work
here than the disputation of scholars. What I was witnessing was a jihad in
which Charles Murray was the infidel....

It has been intellectually refreshing finally to encounter in the pages of
Commentary the real Charles Murray rather than a devil-person. I can now
explore both sides of a legitimate question Stephen Gould so decidedly
intended to remain unexamined.

W.H. RYAN LaConner, Washington

Charles Murray writes:

I am grateful for the letters from Ernest van den Haag, J. Philippe
Rushton, Lloyd B. Lewis, and W.H. Ryan. But I must pass up further comment on
these letters to focus on the critical ones from James J. Heckman, Charles
Lane, Leon J. Kamin, Richard E. Nisbett, and Linda Datcher Loury.

In "'The Bell Curve' and Its Critics," I discussed four issues that have
been the subject of intense attack: the idea of a general factor of mental
ability; the possibility that genes play a part in ethnic IQ differences; the
statistical power of the results reported in The Bell Curve; and the attempts
to raise IQ through program interventions.

James J. Heckman's letter deals primarily with issues involving the general
factor of mental ability "The basic premise of the book," Mr. Heckman writes,
"is that g--or a single factor of intelligence--explains behavior, and that it
is immutable." But this characterization, which provides the rationale for the
criticisms in his letter and for much of his longer critiques of The Bell
Curve published elsewhere, constitutes a straw man that bears no resemblance
to the spirit or content of the book. At no point do the late Richard
Herrnstein and I hint that IQ is an all-powerful determinant of behavior, or
that IQ is immutable.(1)

Let me offer some examples of our plainly stated view on these issues.

Although we regard intelligence as helping to "explain" behavior in a
statistical sense, we repeatedly emphasize how much IQ scores leave
unexplained. In the introduction, when we first describe our view of
intelligence, we conclude with this passage:

All of this is another way of making a point so important that we will
italicize now and repeat it frequently throughout the book: measures of
intelligence have reliable statistical relationships with important social
phenomena, but they are a limited tool for deciding what to make of any given
individual (p. 21).

On page 68, after displaying a scatterplot of two variables with a
correlation of.33, we again put our message in italics to make it hard to
miss: For virtually every topic we will be discussing throughout the rest of
the book, a plot of the raw data would reveal as many or more exceptions to
the general statistical relationship, and this must always be remembered in
trying to transtate the general rule to individuals.

And in the introduction to Part II, opening the analyses of the
relationship of IQ to social behaviors:

High cognitive ability is generally associated with socially desirable
behaviors, low cognitive ability with socially undesirable ones. "Generally
associated with" does not mean "coincident with." For virtually all of the
topics we will be discussing, cognitive ability accounts for only small to
middling proportions of the variation among people (p. 117).

When Mr. Heckman further writes in his letter that ". . . many skills
affect outcomes and not all can be equated with native intelligence," may I
suggest that we said exactly the same thing?:

Perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had better not have his
heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead he wants to run his own
business, become a U.S. Senator, or make a million dollars, he should not put
aside those dreams because some of his friends have higher scores. The link
between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other
characteristics he brings to his life (p. 66).

In the light of such statements, I only wonder how Mr. Heckman, a careful
scholar, can write, "Once [the role of many skills] is recognized, a core
argument in The Bell Curve evaporates."

Mr. Heckman is equally wrong about our position on the immutability of
intelligence. In the introduction we state, as one of six general points
well-established in the literature, that "IQ scores are stable, although not
perfectly so, over much of a person's life," adding immediately that "All six
points have an inverse worth noting. For example, some people's scores change
a lot . . ." (p. 23). With regard to actual changes in intelligence, we credit
the establishment of universal education with having major effects on
intelligence (pp. 396-97, 589-592); similarly with adoption at birth (pp.
411-13). With regard to other potential means of changing intelligence, we are
more aggressive: "Limitless possibilities for improving intelligence
environmentally wait to be uncovered by science.... In principle, intelligence
can be raised environmentally to unknown limits" p. 390). This is not the work
of authors who believe that intelligence is immutable.

In the last two lines of his letter, Mr. Heckman makes two large
statements: first, that one of the measures of intelligence we use is really
an achievement test, not a test of mental ability; and second, that it can be
manipulated. The test he refers to is the Armed Forces Qualification Test
(AFQT).

Concerning the AFQT as a measure of intelligence: all IQ tests are designed
for a reference population. In the case of the AFQT, that population is people
in their late teens who have been exposed to the American school system. But
the fact that items on a test depend on some past education does not
necessarily mean that the test is no longer a measure of general intelligence.
The brief story, told at length in Appendix 3 of The Bell Curve, is that the
AFQT is one of the most highly g-loaded tests in current use.

Would The Bell Curve's results have been different if we had access to one
of the many other standardized mental tests? Unlikely. The AFQT is more highly
correlated with other major IQ tests than other ma or IQ tests are correlated
with each other (pp. 584-85).

Can the AFQT scores be manipulated? Yes--on the computer, by
econometricians using complex statistical models. What about by school
administrators and teachers trying to keep someone in school for another year
to raise his AFQT score? Not much; but more on this below.

As for Mr. Heckman's statement that I cite John Carroll's work
misleadingly, I can only say that it will come as a surprise to Carroll, who
at my request reviewed and approved my citation of his work.

Mr. Lane is shocked and horrified that I cite scholars who have received
funding from the Pioneer Fund. The one paragraph I devoted to the subject in
my article was not intended to rebut his allegations but to express my disdain
for them. As I have written elsewhere, the attempt to discredit a book at
third hand--by tracing the funding history of some of the scholarship it
refers to--is a form of McCarthyism. I do not choose that adjective lightly.

In that sense, I also do not care whether Lane's accusations about the
history of the Pioneer Fund arc true, although I have read enough of the
Pioneer Fund's side of the story to doubt them. To me, the key point is that
for some decades the Pioneer Fund has given money to legitimate scholars to
work on topics, of legitimate scientific inquiry, and it makes no attempt
whatsoever to influence the course of that work.

As for the sources themselves in The Bell Curve, the one criterion
Herrnstein and I followed was whether the work had scientific merit, and was
relevant to our presentation. So let us examine Mr. Lane's and Mr. Kamin's
charges on that count.

As a preliminary, let me take up Mr. Kamin's complaint about the logic
linking African IQ the legacy of slavery, and African-American IQ, and simply
say that the logic he finds objectionable is not ours. Our strategy in Chapter
13 was to answer all the common questions about ethnic differences in
intelligence. In the course of writing the book, it quickly became apparent
that many people assumed scores of blacks in Africa would be higher than
scores of blacks in the U.S., on the theory that colonialism or apartheid was
less destructive than the legacy of 250 years of slavery. We did not try to
assess the relative oppressiveness of these systems; we simply told readers
that such expectations were wrong. African IQ has been found to be
substantially lower than African-American IQ.

How valid are the studies that show African scores on mental tests as
markedly low? Richard Lynn, a careful scholar who has been the target of
almost as much unwarranted criticism as J. Philippe Rushton, converted scores
on the existing studies of African cognitive ability to IQ scores, and found
that they fall in a range from the 60's to the 80's, with a mean of about 70
and a median of 75.(2) His rationale for converting the scores is defensible
but also unnecessary to his argument. One may instead use standard deviations
or percentiles to make the same case: the African mean on cognitive tests is
in the region of two standard deviations below the white mean, or somewhere
below the fifth percentile of the white or European distributions on the same
tests.

Might it be, as Mr. Kamin argues, that these studies are invalid because
the tests were administered to illiterates, or to Africans who could not be
expected to be familiar with culturally specific bits of information; No. The
largest and most careful of the studies have sometimes been limited to urban
populations, to persons who have graduated from middle school, to students
still in school at the secondary level, or to employed persons. such samples
may if anything tend to overestimate, not underestimate, the national mean by
overloading the sample with persons who have had the ability and persistence
to remain in school or hold jobs.

Many of the best studies have also used Raven's Standard Progressive
Matrices (SPM), which is an excellent measure of the nonverbal component of
IQ, is highly g-loaded, and is not bound by culturally specific information.
Does it help to have been in school to do the SPM? Probably--and the samples
in the best African studies have been students in school.

To illustrate how troubling the results have been, let me turn to two
studies postdating Lynn's review. One, from South Africa, was led by Kenneth
Owen (not the study mentioned by Mr. Kamin). The results were published in the
refereed British journal, Personality and Individual Differences.(3) Its
sample consisted of enrolled seventh-grade students and included 1,056 whites,
778 "coloreds" (mixed-race), 1,063 Indians, and 1,093 blacks. The SPM was
administered without time limits. Except in the case of the Indians, subjects
were tested by school psychologists of the same ethnic group.

Owen presents the full psychometric profile for the test results
(distributional characteristics, reliability, item difficulty, item
discrimination, congruence coefficients, and discriminant analysis),
demonstrating that the test did indeed measure the same thing in each of the
various ethnic groups. The discrepancies in mean scores? Expressed in standard
deviations, they were as follows: Indian-white: -.52; colored-white: -1.35;
black-white: -2.78. This black-white difference is larger than Lynn's earlier
estimates.

The second recent study was conducted by a black scholar, Fred Zindi.(4) It
took 204 black Zimbabwean pupils and 202 white English students from London
inner-city schools and matched them according to age (1 2-14), sex, and
educational level; both samples were "working-class." Despite the fact that
the white sample was well below average for whites, with a mean IQ--as
measured by the test known as WISC-R--of only 95, the difference between
whites and blacks was 1.97 standard deviations on the SPM and 2.36 standard
deviations on the WISC-R. Mr. Zindi reported these as Iq's of 72 for the SPM
and 67 for the WISC-R--consistent with Lynn's earlier estimates. (There is
reason to think that the WISC-R score was somewhat depressed by language
considerations, but not much.)

What should one make of these results? Above all, we must proceed
cautiously, for the same reasons that guided us in The Bell Curve. Our view
was that the differences between groups will narrow over time, probably
dramatically, as nutrition and the quality of schools improve for black
Africans. Changes in black African culture may also provide an environment
more conducive to cognitive development among young children. But that does
not mean that the current differences, as measured through these samples, are
figments of the imagination, or that differences in test scores do not
represent real differences in cognitive functioning. They do, and those
differences are extremely large, much larger than the differences separating
American blacks and whites.

You may choose to believe that Owen is a white racist who wittingly or
unconsciously rigged the results, although his scholarly reputation belies it.
(Zindi would seem exempt from the same charge.) You may choose to believe that
the poor black performance is itself a consequence of colonialism and
apartheid and will soon vanish. But these are just assumptions. When data are
as carefully collected and analyzed as these, attention must be paid.

RICHARD E. NISBETT takes a different tack, focusing on studies in the
American context. He begins by complaining that Herrnstein and I discussed
only one of seven studies that bear on racial ancestry at sufficient length to
suit him. We alluded to two others, he acknowledges, but dismissively. Here,
however, is our sentence evaluating one of them: "The study is inconclusive
but certainly consistent with the suggestion that the B/W [black-white]
difference is largely environmental" (p. 310). Of the other, we wrote:

If the whites who contributed this ancestry were a random sample of all
whites, then this would be strong evidence of no genetic influence on
black-white differences. There is no evidence one way or the other about the
nature of the white ancestors (p. 729).

These sentences sound to me like the phrasing of careful social scientist
trying to give as much credit to studies as the data warrant. What does Mr.
Nisbett find unjustifiably dismissive in either of them?

In his letter, Mr. Nisbett does not cite the remaining four studies, but in
his article in The Bell Curve Wars he cites studies from before 1975 that are
also discussed in a book by John Loehlin, Gardner Lindzey, and J.N. Spuhler.
Here is what we said about these studies in The Bell Curve:

Several smaller studies bearing on racial ancestry and IQ were well
summarized almost two decades ago by Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler. They found
the balance of evidence tipped toward some sort of mixed gene-environment
explanation of the B/W difference without saving how much of the difference is
genetic and how much environmental.

If Mr. Nisbett is going to claim that we misled our readers by skipping
over literature we did not like, he must show that we misrepresented Loehlin,
Lindzey, and Spuhler's review of the evidence; or that their conclusions were
themselves wrong; or that some decisive change in their evaluation has been
prompted by subsequent work. He does none of these things, instead offering a
one-sentence summary of the (unspecified) literature. I submit that our
one-sentence summary is more balanced and prudent than his. Interested readers
with access to a university library can look up Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler,
Chapter 5, and decide for themselves.

Mr. Nisbett is correct, however, in saying that we devote most of our
attention to one study, known as the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.
Why? Because the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was for more than a
decade Exhibit No.-1 for optimists on the nature of black-white differences,
and was widely cited as close-to-definitive empirical proof that such
differences in intelligence were environmental.

As it happens, the early data from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study
were not as unambiguously positive as they were often reported to be in the
press.(6) At age seven, the scores of the black adoptees were below those of
the white adoptees, and even further below those of white biological children
of the adoptive parents. Still, the mean of the black and interracial adoptees
was 106; which was not only higher than the Minnesota black mean of about 89
but higher than the national white mean. This was good news by any standard.

In the late 1980's, however, when the same children were tested in
adolescence, the IQ means were as follows: 109 for the biological children of
white parents; 106 for the adopted white children; 99 for the adopted children
with one black biological parent; and 89 for the adopted children with two
black biological parents.(7) As we put it in the book: "The bottom line is
that the gap between the adopted children with two black parents and the
adopted children with two white parents was 17 points, in line with the B/W
difference customarily observed" (p. 310). This is bad news by any standard.

If the national black-white difference is in the region of 15 points, and
if, after growing up in white homes, adopted black children still are just as
far behind, then the first, parsimonious explanation of such differences must
be that they are largely genetic. I have no problem with the attempt of the
authors of the Minnesota study to search for alternative, environmental
explanations for the results, which Mr. Nisbett cites enthusiastically. Thus,
when those authors-Richard Weinberg, Sandra Scarr, and Irwin Waldman--came to
offer conclusions, they wrote:

The results of the longitudinal follow-up continue to support the view that
the social environment maintains a dominant role in determining the average IQ
of black and interracial children and that both social and genetic variables
contribute to individual variations among them (p. 133).

Other scholars argue (as Herrnstein and I thought) that Weinberg, Scarr,
and Waldman retreated too far from parsimony, trying too hard to squeeze the
last ounce out of an environmental explanation. But here is the key point:
this is an ordinary scholarly difference of opinion, bounded by common
agreement. Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman acknowledge that their data indicate
that some genetic component is probably involved--as indeed their data make it
very hard to deny.

I have rehearsed the African IQ data and the Minnesota Transracial Adoption
data at such length because, in the letters printed above as in the published
reviews of The Bell Curve, our discussion of the possibility of genetic racial
differences in intelligence has been attacked so relentlessly. What has all
the fuss been about? Let me, for the umpteenth time, repeat our concluding
paragraph here:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental
explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a
sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly
likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial
differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue;
as far as we can determine, the evidence does not vet justify an estimate (p.
311).

At present, this is the scientifically prudent position.

One final aspect of the black-white difference is raised by Mr. Nisbett,
who claims that I continue to refer to a black-white gap of 15 IQ points while
our own account in The Bell Curve reveals a median current gap of only 9 IQ
points. "Herrnstein and Murray's description of these data goes beyond dubious
analysis, beyond irresponsibly selective choice of evidence, to become
outright misrepresentation of a state of affairs."

Mr. Nisbett has it exactly wrong. Far from ignoring evidence of
convergence, Herrnstein and I were, if anything, guilty of downplaying
important evidence that the current black-white gap is not closing at all but
diverging, and that the actual current gap is not just 15 points, but some
larger figure.

Mr. Nisbett's use of a 9-point gap comes from our review of recent IQ test
data (pp. 289-90) as reported in an article by Ken Vincent.(8) There, Vincent
argued that studies of children in the 1980's indicate a smaller difference
than is observed among adults. But (a familiar story) the studies Vincent used
are beset by problems of interpretation: unrepresentative samples, results
that in the technical literature are said to be artifactual, and, in five of
the studies, a control for socioeconomic background that is guaranteed to
reduce the black-white difference by about 40 percent. Nonetheless, we called
Vincent's evidence encouraging, as indeed it is.

But another, much larger source of data on the black-white difference among
today's children, not used by Vincent, is also available. Every two years
since 1986, the children of the women in the National Longitudinal Study of
Youth (NLSY) have been tested on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a
nationally normed and widely used measure of child IQ. When we wrote The Bell
Curve, we had access to the data through the 1990 testing cycle. We alluded to
it at the end of our review of Vincent's data, and presented the actual
numbers in Chapter 15. Restricting the comparison to pairs of mothers and
children who had been tested, we reported the gap separating the black and
white mothers as 13.2 IQ points, while the gap separating the children was
17.5 points. We also said that "There are technical reasons to hedge on any
more specific interpretation of these data" (p. 356).

I have looked since then at the data through the 1992 testing cycle. The
same trend persists, even after correcting for the ways in which current
samples are unrepresentative. Nor should it be surprising that the NLSY is
yielding these results. They are consistent with the expectations one may draw
from the national birth data, which show a marked black-white divergence in
births based on educational level of the mother (which in turn has a reliable
correlation with maternal IQ).

There are still reasons to hedge on what will eventually happen to the
black-white difference, but the notion that the balance of the data
demonstrates a brighter future, let alone only a 9-point difference, ignores
reality. The Bell Curve's summary of the situation struck the right note, I
think:

Many of you will be wondering why we have felt it necessary to qualify the
good news [on convergence of scores!. A smaller number of readers who
specialize in mental testing may be wondering why we have given so much
prominence to educational achievement trends and a scattering of IQ results
that may be psychometrically ephemeral. The answer for everyone is that
predicting the future on this issue is little more than guesswork at this
point. We urge upon our readers a similar suspension ofjudgment (p. 295).

In "'The Bell Curve' and Its Critics," I argued that the book undermined
the importance of socioeconomic background (SES) as an explanation for social
outcomes. Linda Datcher Loury takes me to task for not acknowledging a large
and expanding literature on the many factors other than traditional measures
of SES that are known to affect such outcomes.

Her criticism is not without merit, but also not entirely on point. I did
not argue that no one has explored other factors. I pointed out, rather, that
(1) SES has for many years been a staple in academic analyses of why children
of some families become poor, why they drop out of school, why they commit
crimes, etc.; (2) a major purpose of The Bell Curve was to add IQ to this
standard set of explanatory variables; (3) our use of SES has come in for much
frivolous criticism; and (4) The Bell Curve has diminished the persuasiveness
of the role of SES in explaining social problems. Nothing in Mrs. Loury's
letter disputes the last three points. As for the first, does she really want
to contend that in academic treatments of poverty, welfare, crime, and other
social pathologies discussed in Part 11 of The Bell Curve, socioeconomic
background has not (along with racism) been the dominant explanatory construct
since the 1960's?

But Mrs. Loury is quite right that I should have acknowledged the growing
literature on other explanatory variables. When I write about this issue in
the future, I will amend my presentation accordingly.

The final topic in my article was my prediction that the attacks on The
Bell Curve will backfire by forcing policy-makers to confront just how
difficult it is to make substantial, long-term improvements in cognitive
functioning. As promised earlier, I will now return to this point.

Here, again, Herrnstein and I are accused of dismissing studies we did not
dismiss. In this case, Richard Nisbett cites two studies of intervention in
infancy "both of which had very positive results but which they reject on
methodological grounds." He refers to the Milwaukee Project and the
Abecedarian Project. This, to be tiresome about it, is what we actually wrote:

In summary, the two experiments contain some promising leads. But it is not
obvious where to go from here, for they differed in possibly important ways.
The Abecedarian Project evaluated day care; the Milwaukee Project provided
numerous interventions besides day care, including parental payment and
training. It is hard to tell whether the former found enduring IQ benefits,
given the very early divergence in test scores for experimental and control
groups, but it found some academic benefits; the latter found an enduring IQ
gain, but it has not vet shown comparable intellectual gains in school work
(p. 409).

This is what he calls a rejection? Is he prepared to claim more for these
two projects than we did?

Mr. Nisbett also asserts that we "ignore a dozen studies not subject to
such [methodological] criticisms but having results consistent with the two
they reject." Once again he has wrongly accused us of ignoring studies that we
covered, in this case using the respected synthesis of the literature
conducted by the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies.(9) Overall, the
Consortium found about a 7-point gain in the exit test for such interventions,
a gain that faded out within a few years. In the end, concluded the
Consortium, "The effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not
permanent."

In the next part of his letter Mr. Nisbett refers to a variety of
interventions that conflate improvements in educational instruction and
achievement (which neither Herrnstein nor I would dispute) with improvements
in cognitive ability. This distinction is crucial, however. Do we know how to
take a set of youngsters with a given tested IQ and reliably improve their
educational achievement? Yes. Do we know how to take a set of youngsters with
a given tested IQ that would not (for example) allow them to become engineers,
and reliably raise their cognitive functioning so that they can become
engineers? No. Do we know how to sustain gains in IQ if we sustain the
enriched curriculum? Mr. Nisbett says that we do. In my article, I observed
that we have no credible study offering evidence of significant, long-term
effects on cognitive functioning that Herrnstein and I did not consider in The
Bell Curve. I am still waiting for a citation. Mr. Nisbett offers none.

I grant that he is one-twelfth correct when he complains of the dozen
studies we failed to consider in The Bell Curve. The eight-site study he
mentions, in which preschool, social, and pediatric services were supplied to
low-birthweight (less than 2,500 grams) ial, however. Do we know how to take a
set of youngsters with a given tested IQ and reliably improve their
educational achievement? Yes. Do